Life in Texas Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

UT Baseball – A Model of Stability

For Red’s lifetime, UT-Austin has had three Head Baseball Coaches. Bibb Falk, Cliff Gustafson and Augie Garrido. After UT reassigned 20 year veteran Garrido to other duties after failing to make the playoffs 3 out of the last 5 years, the School will have only its 5th baseball coach in the last 100 years. Red guesses that if new coach David Pierce gets the average 25 year run for UT baseball coaches, he will consider himself well ahead of the game.

Pierce, most recently head coach at Tulane for two seasons, is a self-described “slow-talking Texan” who doesn’t yet have 200 total wins in a career spent mostly as an assistant and just five seasons as a head coach.

Pierce was introduced at a news conference on Thursday one day after being hired away from Tulane. Pierce who has had stations in Texas high schools and at Rice remarked that taking over as the Longhorns’ coach at age 53 “a special day, a special journey.”

There will be pressure on Pierce to perform as the once-hot Longhorn baseball program now seems to be an afterthought on campus with dwindling fan interest. A quick return to the College World Series would help. As his predecessor Garrido — the winningest coach in college baseball history — liked to say “Omaha is the standard” at Texas.